DIRECTIONS OF CHANGE IN CANADIAN ENGLISH

Sali A. Tagliamonte

A SSHRCC funded research project, #410070048

 

Where did recent changes in Canadian English come from?

Where are they headed?

 

The Directions of Change (Doc) project seeks to collect and analyze new corpora of Canadian English and, in doing so, contribute new insights into language change. Two types of speech communities are being studied: 1) established populations in rural communities; and 2) Immigrant populations with in Toronto. The DoC project sits on the foundations of The Toronto English Corpus (Tagliamonte, 2003-2006), a collection of sociolinguistic interviews with 'old-line' Torontonians, and the largest corpus of Toronto English ever collected. The main focus will be comparative analysis of features known to be currently undergoing change in Toronto with this data.

The project is currently in the initial stages. The summer of 2007 was the summer of interviews and transcriptions for the researchers. Five insider interviewers entered four Ontario communities and as of August 2007, a total of 60 interviews have been conducted. For more information about each community, click on the map of Ontario below.